Posted on 01/14/2007 6:01:26 AM PST by SHOOT THE MOON bat
Extremism: Radical preachers offer a magical world for battered believers.The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternité-egalité-liberté, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.
During the last two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment whether I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, potholed streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.
We as a nation have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed through during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas, who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits. There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. And such distortions, as Plutarch reminded us, have grave political consequences for democracies. The top 1 percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy.
The stories believers told me of their lives before they found Christ were heartbreaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world - the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world in which news and information were not filtered through the comforting ideological prism of radical religion, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits - betrayed them. They hated this world.
And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by radical preachers - a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened daily to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me toward those who challenge this belief system - to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible - was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East, and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes, as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be "raptured" upward, while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.
Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.
All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters, or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to give them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.
They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Hedges' new book is "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
Sounds like the Iraqi government. Maybe the Arab disease is catching.
This is actually the Inquirer doing for Hedges what the MSM has been doing for Boxer, and SOP for the Leftist Media-- protecting them by not printing the intensity of the hatred of their comments. I took a look at the dust jacket of the book at the bookstore, and Hedges is quite open in calling the so-called Christian Right fascists. So, obviously that's hate speech and the Inquirer is going to pretend to the vast majority of readers who will never lay eyes on the book that it didn't happen.
FREE PRESS is apparently a Soros entity, and the publisher of this book. Why is the Inquirer promoting it?
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be "raptured" upward, while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.
If he knew the rest of the story, this raving writer would soil himself! True, the most commonly held eschatology today, dispensational premillennialism of the ilk propelling the awful "left below" books, assumes that God intends to give the other team uncontested turns at bat.
However, the best thinking isn't happening there.
The future is being shaped by the post-millennial Christians whose scholarship is transforming the best minds of the coming generations. And the traffic is only going one way. Millions of one-time defeatists have become rather fond of "victory in Jesus." I know of no one who's gone the other direction, embracing hopeless fatalism as God's best plan for their lives.
Actually the world has feared the Church from day 1. Jesus said His kingdom wasn't of this world. That's a threat to the kingdoms of earth.
It would appear that the writer did talk with some Christians...but he isn't within a thousand miles of grasping what they said. Very sad, actually.
Good point
Excellent letter,I wonder if they will print it in "Letters to the Editor". If they do,or if you get a response,I hope you will let us know.
Mr. Satullo wrote back; a nice, cordial letter. He disagreed with me, of course.......said the book this was taken from had been well-researched, etc. etc......I replied.....but made it clear that although I respected his journalistic integrity, I wouldn't grant the same to Hedges and gave my reasons why not. I give credit to Mr. Satullo for taking the time to respond (at length) and in a civil manner, however.
Quite a rant.Still,maybe it's not that surprising.
His head is telling him God doesn't exist but his heart is betraying the fact that the Word of God is "a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart"
Coupled with the verse you quoted,it's no wonder that this is the sort of stuff that oozes from some of the wise of this world.
God bless
It sounds a little bit like Hitler's "jewish problem" don'tcha think?
OK, the message is false. Liberals and other unbelievers are driven by despair. Next question?
PING
Did you read this one? What a nutjob! I think he plagiarized Goebbels.
hmmm. If you are incapable of irony, then I misread your original post. I thought you were being ironic.
That was my other personality.
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